The Smart One

Chapter 12





Thanksgiving started weeks before it actually happened. It was the way it always had been. There was shopping to get done, the house needed to be cleaned, silver needed to be polished. There were logistics that had to be figured out—who was coming, who was staying where, who was a vegetarian this year, who was lactose intolerant. There were phone calls to be had with Maureen, to complain about their mother and her absolute refusal to cooperate with anyone on anything. “She doesn’t want to come?” Maureen said every year. “Great, let’s leave her in Michigan. I’m good with that, are you?”

Years ago, when they were both first married and had little babies in the house, they used to switch off hosting Thanksgiving. This didn’t last long. Weezy ended up doing all of the cooking anyway, and most of the cleaning, and honestly it was just easier to have it at her own house in her own kitchen.

The past few years had gotten more complicated, since they started to think that Bets shouldn’t travel by herself. Cathy and Ruth had taken on the responsibility of driving almost three hours from Ohio to Auburn Hills to pick up Bets and fly with her from Detroit. It wasn’t convenient, but none of them could think of a better alternative. Bets, of course, still thought she was fine to travel alone, so Cathy and Ruth had to think of excuses for why they were going to be up that way anyway. “We’re visiting friends,” they always told Bets. She acted like she was doing them a favor, letting them stay at her house for a night before they all flew to Philadelphia.

“Cathy’s coming again this year,” she told Weezy. “I guess some of her lesbian friends live up this way.”

“Great, well, that works out for everyone.” Weezy didn’t know how many more years they could realistically keep asking Cathy and Ruth to escort a crabby old lady on a plane.

Weezy and Maureen still alternated who Bets would stay with, and unfortunately this was Weezy’s year. “Tough break,” Maureen said. She didn’t mean it. Bets was a horrendous houseguest. If Will emptied the dishwasher, she commented on Weezy’s lack of housekeeping skills. Once, Weezy put out cocktail napkins and Bets had called her hoity-toity. There was no winning.

They used to invite their cousins the Nugents from Pittsburgh, but thankfully that had stopped after Bets’s sister, Linda, died and all of the children’s children had reproduced so many times that it was impossible to fit everyone in the same house. They were an odd bunch. Linda had once brought a basket of stuffed reindeer to the house, and Weezy assumed (as one might) that she’d brought them for the kids. “How nice of you,” she said. “I’m sure Martha and Claire will be thrilled.” She tried to take the basket away from Linda, who held on tight.

“These are my pets,” she’d said. “Our last dog died and we’re too old to get another one, so now these are my pets.” She’d walked into the house with her basket and proceeded to tell anyone who would listen about each of the reindeer. “This is Misty, she’s shy. Bernie is bossy.” Martha and Claire were six and seven that year, and they’d petted the stuffed animals with wide eyes, as if even at that age, they knew that their great-aunt Linda had really gone bat shit crazy.

Linda was the only person who Bets refused to say a bad word about. She once admitted that she thought her sister had “married down,” but that was all. Bets still went to stay with her sister’s children between Thanksgiving and Christmas, taking the train from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and spending a week or so with each of them. She bought their children gifts and raved about the cooking. “Your cousin Patty really knows how to fry a chicken,” she’d say, while watching Weezy prepare chicken cutlets.

Weezy didn’t really keep in touch with any of her cousins anymore, except for a Christmas card each year, and a call to talk about Bets’s stay. But she was eternally grateful to them for taking Bets for the stretch between the two holidays. Getting her back and forth from Michigan twice a year would have been a nightmare, and while Weezy suspected that Bets was much kinder and more charming to her nieces and nephews than she was to her daughters, she still couldn’t have been an easy guest.

Maureen was coming over today to talk about menus. Ruth was a vegan, which was a choice that Weezy respected, but it made cooking for her almost impossible. The girl was so nice about it, always brought over a side dish of her own, and assured Weezy that she was getting enough to eat, but Weezy didn’t see how that was possible, considering that pretty much all she could eat was plain vegetables and nothing else. Last year, they’d made a special pecan pie for her, and out of curiosity, Weezy took a bite. She’d made herself swallow, but it wasn’t easy. Poor, thin Ruth, she’d thought. No butter or meat, what a sad life.

She was happy that none of her children had entered into the world of vegetarianism. Unless you counted the two years in high school when Claire refused to eat red meat, but even then she’d eat chicken occasionally. She was just doing it to be difficult, really. Even Cleo ate meat, thank God. Not that she considered Cleo one of her children—it was way too early for that. So at least she had that much to be thankful for, that her children were getting enough protein. Ruth should probably be taking iron pills, and Weezy made a note to ask her about that.

Maureen was late, which was not unusual. In fact, it was almost expected. It surprised Weezy how Maureen could be so organized and efficient in her work, and have none of that spill over to her personal life. Maureen was an executive assistant for John McLaughlin, one of the VPs at Price Waterhouse. She had been there for over twenty-five years and as he got promoted, she went with him. He called Maureen his “right-hand man” and he meant it. She kept his schedule, was loyal to him, and always had her ear out for talk among the assistants of any rumblings in the company. She kept his office running tightly and smoothly, and you would never know that she often ran out of dishwasher detergent at home and forgot to replace it for weeks.

Maureen had gone back to college after her husband left, and it had taken her almost three years, during which Cathy and Drew spent a lot of nights eating dinner with the Coffeys, and sometimes spent whole weekends there so that Maureen could make it to class and study. But she’d done it, and landed the job with John right after she graduated.

“You went back to college to be a secretary?” Bets asked when she got the news. “I was a secretary for years, and I didn’t need to go to college.”

“An executive assistant,” Maureen corrected her. Bets had rolled her eyes, but her job was one thing that Maureen never doubted. She loved working for John. She was friendly with his wife, attended his children’s first communions and graduations, and accepted his investment advice. Maureen loved everything about her job, feeling in control and having lunch with her friends in the office. Hearing her talk about it always made Weezy a little jealous.

Now, John was over sixty and his role in the company was getting smaller. He wanted to retire. He and his wife wanted to move to Maine full-time. For the time being, he still had an office at the company, but he’d been moved to a small office, and while Maureen went in every day, she was done by one o’clock at the latest. There just wasn’t much to do. She set up his golf games and answered e-mails and phone calls about when he would be in the office. Sometimes he came in and they organized files or went over things. But by next year, he would be gone, and Maureen would be retired as well. She wouldn’t need to work, thanks to the investments she’d so wisely listened to him about, but she wasn’t looking forward to it.

“All those days, stretching on, spending them all by myself,” she’d said. “It seems so definite.”

“You’re not by yourself,” Weezy told her. But she knew what Maureen meant.

Maureen kept suggesting that they start a business venture together, but she was just talking, just trying to grasp at something so that she wouldn’t feel lost. She’d mentioned a dog-walking business and a paint-your-own pottery store in the same sentence, and Weezy knew that she was just going a little bonkers over the change.

The feeling of loss was understandable. It was like Max and his hockey. He’d played since he was four years old. He took to skates right away, a natural, which surprised Will and Weezy, since neither of the girls liked it at all. The few times the girls had gone skating when they were little, Weezy and Will had to drag them around on the ice, their little mittened hands gripping their parents’ tightly.

But Max stood up on his own right away. It was really something to see. For a while there, Weezy was convinced that he was going to be an Olympian or a professional athlete. It was amazing, to watch this little boy glide on the ice, forward and backward, like it was nothing. And then, when the Pee Wee coach handed him a stick, he just smiled. It was like he’d always been holding it.

They threw him into the sport wholeheartedly. Will loved hockey, and Max’s being the star of the team was just a bonus. What Will and Weezy learned about the sport very quickly was that they were required to be just as involved. There were club teams and tournaments. There were day camps and sleepaway camps. Soon, their weekends were filled with driving Max to different locations (often different states) to play hockey.

Weezy loved watching Max play. Her sweet, even-tempered baby turned into something else on the ice. He was fluid and graceful and also could be ruthless and sneaky, coming up beside someone, checking them with his shoulder, and then skating on, like nothing had happened.

Hockey took up almost all of their time, and they often grumbled to each other about it, but it was too late to back out. It was exhausting and it seemed that they were always trying to schedule around a hockey game of some sort. Holidays were cut short, and long weekends were spent in Canada and Michigan.

And then, just like that, it was over. Max went to college and decided that he didn’t want to try out for the team. He didn’t think he’d start, he told them, and it seemed like a lot of time and work to sit on the bench. He decided to play on the club team, which was really just a bunch of boys getting together at eleven o’clock at night to play around on the ice and drink.

After that, Weezy felt like part of her life was missing. Did she really miss the hours in the car? The nights spent in questionable hotels in random Canadian towns? No, she told herself, she couldn’t miss that. But there was a loss when it was gone. And so Weezy understood it when Maureen talked about missing work. Even if the whole point of a job was to be done with it someday, to be able to relax, it could become a part of you, it could become how you saw yourself. And when it was gone, it left a hole.

MAUREEN LET HERSELF IN THE back door, apologizing before she was even inside. “I know, I know,” she said. “I’m sorry, I got stuck talking to someone at work.”

“That’s okay,” Weezy said. And it was. They didn’t have all that much to go over, actually. She’d spread the cookbooks out on the table, and had the lists of what they’d made for the past five Thanksgivings.

“So, Cathy and Ruth are all set with Bets?” Weezy asked.

“Yep. They’re leaving Ohio on Tuesday, and they’ll stay over with Bets that night, and they all fly out bright and early on Wednesday.”

“God bless them.”

“No kidding. But you know, I’m paying for their tickets, so it’s not like they’re getting nothing out of the deal.”

“Still.”

The two of them talked about the pies that they wanted to make. Pumpkin, of course. Pecan was Max’s favorite. Bets always wanted something with chocolate in it, and then there was an apple-cranberry crisp that looked good.

“Four desserts?” Weezy said. “That seems like a lot, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Maureen agreed. “I guess we’ll lose the crisp?”

Weezy nodded. The crisp was actually her favorite, but there was nothing else that could be cut from the list without a lot of whining and complaining from the group. And none of them needed four desserts. Especially not Weezy or Maureen, who were starting to both look just a little barrel-shaped in the past five years, no matter how much they exercised.

“So this is the trade-off?” Maureen had asked, when she’d started to go through menopause, just a year and a half after Weezy. “No more cramps, but now I’ll just be hot as hell and fat?”

Weezy couldn’t even find it in herself to tell her it would get better. Her hot flashes had persisted, well past the time when she thought they should have stopped. “How long will this go on? How many years is normal?”

“I don’t like the term normal,” her doctor had said. Weezy told him that was too bad, because she did like the term normal, loved it even, and so she would be getting a new doctor.

Will and the kids had learned not to say anything when in the middle of winter she’d open the back door and stand there, while the rest of them shivered and moved to the front of the house. She was glad when Maureen started, just so she could have someone to complain with. Weezy’s new doctor had told her that there was a slight chance that she’d have hot flashes for the rest of her life. Maureen never had hot flashes like Weezy. She did, however, have raging mood swings that once caused her to tell Bets to go f*ck herself on Christmas Eve.

WEEZY FILLED IN HER CALENDAR. She entered in when Max and Cleo would arrive, when Bets would get in, who needed to be picked up at the airport when. She woke up every morning and went for a walk, then came back and a few times a week went to that weight-lifting place with Maureen, the one that was made just for menopausal women and had popped up in every suburb across the country.

She was trying to keep herself busy, to keep away from the computer and the wedding blogs and websites. Thanksgiving was a good excuse, she figured. During the day, she did pretty well. But it was at night, when she couldn’t sleep, that she crumbled.

Her favorite wedding blog was called WeddingBellesandWhistles.com and featured a different DIY project every day. It was also filled with tips, and once a week a guest bride wrote an article about an aspect of her wedding. That night, Weezy read about a bride who’d been left behind at the venue, after all of the buses that they hired to take the guests back to the hotel (forty-five minutes away!) had driven off. “Oh no,” Weezy whispered out loud. “What a nightmare.”

Weezy told herself that staying away from weddings during the day was a good start. It was like the patch for smoking, and she felt virtuous when, at the end of the day, she hadn’t checked in even once.

She went to the store and stocked up on all of Max’s favorite foods. She got his room ready for Cleo, washing sheets, vacuuming and dusting, airing everything out. She set Max up in the basement, which was a shame really, that he wouldn’t be able to stay in his own room when he came home, but they couldn’t very well put Cleo down there. She got everything that was on Bets’s list: creamer for her coffee, bran cereal, pistachios, and hard caramel candies. Bets had called several times to go over the list, and Weezy assured her that it was all taken care of.

Maureen had offered to have everyone over for dinner on Wednesday night, which was a nice thought, but just made extra work for Weezy since she’d have to make everything at her house, then pack it all up to take over. Maureen didn’t cook, and she’d suggested ordering pizzas—“Why make it complicated?” she’d asked—but Weezy had shot her down and told her she’d whip up some meatballs.

By the time Max and Cleo arrived on Wednesday morning, everything was ready. Claire was at work for just a half day, and Martha was working all day, so Weezy was the only one there to greet them. She was so happy to see her son, her Max, who walked right in and gave her a huge hug.

Cleo, if it was possible, looked even more gorgeous than she had before. “Hi, Mrs. Coffey,” she said. They gave each other a tentative hug.

“I brought these for you,” Cleo said, and held out a box of chocolates, which was a nice gesture, but Weezy’s first thought was that more food in the house was the last thing that they needed, and when was she going to put these out for people when there were already so many desserts?

But of course she just smiled and said, “Thank you.”

The two of them stood there and smiled at each other, as though they both thought it would convey how thrilled they were to share Thanksgiving. Max was on the ground with Ruby, letting the dog lick his face, bending his head down so she could smell his hair and press her head against his. Ruby wagged her tail more for Max than for anyone, and she was always a little depressed when he left.

“Do you two want something to eat?” Weezy asked. “Max, I got some cold cuts for you. I could make you a sandwich or maybe you want something else? We’re having spaghetti and meatballs at Maureen’s tonight, so you probably don’t want pasta.”

“We’re okay for now,” Max said. “Actually, we’re going to throw our stuff down and head over to John’s to see him and meet up with some people. I think we’ll stop at Gino’s for a cheese steak.”

“Not Pat’s?”

“We went there last time. Cleo has to try both so she knows which one she likes better.” Max gave the back of her neck a squeeze, and she scrunched up her shoulders and laughed.

And then they were gone. They dropped their bags in the rooms and were out the door a few minutes later. “Be sure to be back by four, because Bets will be here and then we’ll head over to Maureen’s.” Max gave her a kiss and they left. She noticed that Cleo looked relieved to be leaving, even though she’d just gotten there.

MAUREEN BURNED THE BREAD. She basically had just one thing to do for the dinner, which was to cook the garlic bread, and it was black when they got there. Smoke filled the kitchen. “I didn’t want to forget it, so I just popped it in,” Maureen said, as if that explained it.

Will was sent out to get more. “Just get some frozen stuff,” Weezy instructed. There was no telling what he’d come back with, but it was a risk they’d have to take. Bets was already sniffing and coughing in the kitchen over the smoke, and Maureen was in the corner sipping a glass of wine.

Weezy turned the fan on and cracked the window in the kitchen, then set to work warming up the meatballs, and instructed Maureen to empty the bags of prewashed salad that she’d gotten that day and to toss them with Italian dressing. She sat Bets down and got her a glass of wine. All of the kids were already in the next room, laughing about something.

“Maureen was never much of a cook,” Bets said.

“Thanks so much, Mom,” Maureen said.

Parents would probably be arrested these days if they talked the way their parents had. Sometimes she still heard her dad’s voice: “Louise is the brains,” he’d say to strangers, “and Maureen’s the looker.”

Will came back with the bread and asked Bets how things were going in the retirement village. “I call it Death Valley,” she told him, “because every other day, there’s a body taken out of there on a stretcher.”

“Bets, you’re a funny one,” he said. He laughed and put his hand on his stomach, and Weezy was amazed, as she always was, that her husband was good-natured enough not just to put up with Bets but to actually seem to enjoy her company.

They finished getting the dinner ready—after sending Will out one more time to get meatless sauce for Ruth, which they’d forgotten—and everyone sat down to eat. The kids were chattering, all happy to see each other, and that made Weezy so happy. When she had Claire, everyone had told her, “Those girls are sure to be best friends,” but they weren’t. And then, when she’d had Max, she was worried that he’d be raised as an only child, not close to his sisters at all, but right from the get-go, he and Claire had been thick as thieves and still were.

She was always happy that Martha and Cathy were so close. It wasn’t the same as a sibling, but at least it was a family member that was a friend. It was Cathy’s poor brother, Drew, really, that was always the odd man out when he was around. Although most of the time, he didn’t even seem to mind.

Will poured them all more red wine and made a toast, and the whole family ate, spilling sauce all over the tablecloth, which would have driven Weezy nuts if it had been her house, but Maureen didn’t seem to notice or care, and so she relaxed and let herself enjoy the dinner.

IT OCCURRED TO WEEZY, after Max was born, that she now had the exact same family that she’d grown up in—two girls, a year apart, and then a boy. Of course, their baby brother, Jimmy, died when he was just a few weeks old and—this was awful, but true—sometimes she forgot that he’d been there at all.

After he’d died, her father delivered the news, very matter-of-factly. “He went to heaven,” he said one morning. He’d already been to the hospital with Bets and Jimmy in the middle of the night. The girls had never even been woken up. A neighbor was called to come and sit in the house with them.

They’d had a funeral for him, a small and quick ceremony. (“Thank God he was already baptized,” their grandmother kept saying. “That’s why you do it right away. Right away. You don’t waste a second.”) There was a baby picture of him placed alongside pictures of Weezy and Maureen on the side table in the front hall. But he was rarely mentioned.

If that had happened these days, if a baby died, people would talk to the kids. They’d probably be in therapy before the funeral was even planned. But Weezy and Maureen never really talked about Jimmy. They knew it was sad—unthinkable—to lose a baby, and after they’d both had kids they maybe understood that a little bit more. But they didn’t feel the sadness, really. Not the way Bets did. She never talked about it, but something changed in her after that. The pictures before were of her smiling widely with lots of lipstick, and after she looked sharper, and always smiled with her mouth closed.

Bets had always hated Philadelphia, still referred to Michigan as home even after she’d been gone for years. She had met James when he was working in Detroit, and she’d been impressed with his “East Coast ways,” as she always put it. They dated for a few months, and when his company transferred him back to Philadelphia, he’d proposed and she’d accepted.

But she’d never liked the people in Philadelphia; she missed her friends and family back home. She seemed to blame James in some way for taking her there, although Weezy always thought, she’d agreed to go, so she couldn’t really complain. After Jimmy died, it was just one more thing that Bets hated about the place.

When James had a heart attack and died Weezy’s freshman year in college, Bets wasted no time. She packed up the house, sold it, and right after Maureen graduated from high school, she moved back to Michigan. Both Weezy and Maureen thought this was a mistake, and they were devastated at losing their childhood home so soon after losing their father. “She’s not going to be happy there,” they told each other. “She has a memory of it, but it won’t be the same when she gets there.”

But they were wrong. Bets thrived back in Michigan. She reconnected with all of “the gals” she’d known growing up, and it was like she’d never been gone for those twenty years. She had no problem leaving Philadelphia, even if that meant moving away from her children. “That was never my home,” she always said about it, as if all of her time there, raising her children, was just one little pause in her real life.

THEY ALL GOT HOME, STUFFED AND TIRED, and Weezy figured everyone would just go to bed, but Claire announced that she was going over to Lainie’s with Max and Cleo.

“You’re going over now?” Weezy asked. “It’s so late already.”

“Mom, it’s fine. It’s not even that late.”

“What about Martha?”

“What about Martha?” Claire repeated.

“Did you invite her?”

“Yep. I told her we were all going but she wasn’t interested.”

“Well, why don’t you invite her again?”

“Why? She already said no.”

“You know sometimes she needs to be convinced to go somewhere,” Weezy said.

“You want me to go beg Martha to come with me, to a party that she doesn’t want to go to?”

“Claire.” Weezy gave her a look, and Claire let out a sigh, but she went upstairs, and returned with Martha in tow. The four of them headed out the door and Weezy called, “Have a good time!”

Weezy settled herself on the couch and turned on the TV. There was so much to be done for tomorrow, but she could rest for just a minute. It’s a Wonderful Life was on, which made it seem like Thanksgiving was already over, like time had just raced by and it was already Christmas.

She watched a little bit of the movie, but her heart wasn’t in it, so she snuck over to the computer and pulled up Wedding Belles and Whistles. She read an article by a bride who was to be married that weekend, and how she’d already arranged to have a plate of Thanksgiving food set aside for her, since she wouldn’t be able to indulge that day. She was making place card holders in the shape of turkeys, which sounded a little silly to Weezy, but they were actually sort of whimsical looking. Just a few minutes, she told herself as she settled into her chair and read all about Thanksgiving Bride’s big day.